Orson Welles did not create any new technology making Citizen Kane but he did use every existing technology of the time (save color) in ways that were unique. There were numerous things that had never been done before with sound, lighting, sets, editing, but we’ll only talk about three of them here.
Photography: One of the most striking images of the film (for me) comes toward the end, when Kane’s second wife leaves him and he trashes her room, rock star-style as his horrified and concerned staff looks on. He walks out of the room past them, oblivious, zombie-like, at one point entering a literal hall or mirrors where his reflection is infinitely (it seems) repeated. Is this a visual way of saying that what’s left of his soul is finally shattered, that there are so many facets to the complex man we can and will never know which is the real Kane—or is it just a director and cinematographer showing off? Probably a little of all three.
Editing: Until Kane editing was mostly fading out of one scene and fading into the next, sometimes a dissolve or spinning clock hands or calendar pages falling away to show the passage of time. But in Kane scene changes are signals before the current scene ends—you hear the sound of flash bulbs then see the flash and suddenly you’re at a press conference. A squawking bird and you’re watching the caravan approaching Xanadu. But probably the most famous use of editing was the interview where Kane’s first wife talks about the dissolution of their marriage:
First scene they are newlyweds, billing and cooing at each other, sitting at a table so small you know their knees must be touching. Cut to:
The couple sitting at a slightly longer table, she is chiding him about something or other and he is trying to appease her. Cut to:
An older and grayer couple at a longer table. She says to him, “Really Charles, people will think—“
“—what I tell them to think,” he snaps at her. Cut to:
The couple sitting at a table so long they might as well be in different rooms; she eating in silence, occasionally glancing up at him, he grimly poring over a newspaper. The arc of a marriage in less than two minutes.
Storytelling: The device of telling a story in flashbacks, from multiple, often contradictory, overlapping points of view is usually attributed to Akira Kurosawa. But Rashomon did not appear until almost a decade after Kane. (This device was most recently used in the movie Vantage Point (2008), and you can see it every week on CBS’s Cold Case.)
Okay, so you’re still underwhelmed by Citizen Kane. No problem; others have said that there are other films that could be considered “the best ever,” among them Casablanca, The Godfather (Parts 1 or 2), Chinatown. And film critic Jim Thompson recently said Kane may be the most “overrated” film of all time because people revere it so, no one can look at it objectively. But consider this:
Say you don’t like westerns (I’m not a big fan myself), but after Sam Peckinpaw used slow-motion during the climactic shootout in The Wild Bunch, other filmmakers adopted it, especially in “death scenes,” from Bonnie and Clyde’s ambush to Sonny’s assassination at the toll booth. You don’t like musical comedies? Okay, but it was the same camera technique that allowed Fred Astaire to dance on the ceiling in Royal Wedding that Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey to make the Moon shuttle flight attendant walk upside down. And CGI, pioneered in “sci-fi movies” show up somewhere in virtually every movie today, from computer-generated crowds to almost anything that explodes.
The thing that makes Citizen Kane a great film is that Welles did so many things first. He has been often imitated, sometimes equaled, but, to date, no one has ever done them better.
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